Tyson Tan is a

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

concept artist Concept art is a form of visual art used to convey an idea for use in films, video games, animation, comic books, or other media before it is put into the final product. Concept art usually refers to world-building artwork used to inspire the de ...

and

character designer In visual arts, a model sheet, also known as a character board, character sheet, character study or simply a study, is a document used to help standardize the appearance, poses, and gestures of a character in arts such as animation, comics, and v ...

. He redesigned

KDE KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...

mascot A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as fi ...

Konqi and designed a few other mascots for

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

projects. Tyson speaks three languages: Chinese, English, and Japanese. Tyson is observed to have been using only

to work since 2012. He has been supporting several FOSS projects in various ways. He has a permissive attitude for others to use his works, and licenses most of his artworks under free licenses like

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

Art style

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel mascot of Krita plastic model kit design sheet

Tyson has an art style that draws inspirations from both

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

and western

cartoons A cartoon is a type of visual art that is typically drawn, frequently animated, in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved over time, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of images ...

. He draws mostly

anthropomorphic Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics t ...

animal characters. He is also known for his ability of designing robotic characters with organic shapes while keeping a level of convincing mechanical details.

Works

FLOSS mascots

Tyson designed

Kiki the Cyber Squirrel Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, and features an OpenGL-accelerated canvas, colour management su ...

as the mascot for

Digital painting Digital painting is an established art medium that typically combines a computer, a graphics tablet, and software of choice. The artist uses painting and drawing with the stylus that comes with the graphics tablet to create 2D paintings within a ...

software

Krita Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on th ...

in 2012, and has been Krita's startup artwork artist since. In 2013, his re-design concept of

's mascot Konqi was chosen from a contest and has been used since KDE version 5.x. He also designed

Kate the woodpecker Kate name may refer to: People and fictional characters * Kate (given name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname * Gyula Káté (born 1982), Hungarian amateur boxer * Lauren Kate (born 1981), American autho ...

as the mascot for advanced text editor

Kate Kate name may refer to: People and fictional characters * Kate (given name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname * Gyula Káté (born 1982), Hungarian amateur boxer * Lauren Kate (born 1981), American autho ...

in 2014. Tyson submitted a mascot (Libbie the Cyber Oryx) for

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source productivity software, office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was fork (software development), forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of t ...

during a contest run by

The Document Foundation The Document Foundation (TDF) is a non-profit organization that promotes open-source document handling software. It was created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite, an ...

in late 2017 however his entry was unsuccessful.

Video games

Tyson drew several pieces of fan-art for the

platform game A platform game (often simplified as platformer and sometimes called a jump 'n' run game) is a sub-genre of action video games in which the core objective is to move the player character between points in an environment. Platform games are charac ...

Freedom Planet ''Freedom Planet'' is a 2D platform video game developed and published by American video game designer Sabrina DiDuro, for her studio GalaxyTrail. The player controls one of three anthropomorphic animal protagonists: the dragon girl Lilac, the ...

'' after its release. His fan-art was later adopted by the game's developer and publisher, GalaxyTrail, for promotional purposes. He later became the concept artist and character designer of the game's sequel, ''

Freedom Planet 2 ''Freedom Planet'' is a 2D platform video game developed and published by American video game designer Sabrina DiDuro, for her studio GalaxyTrail. The player controls one of three anthropomorphic animal protagonists: the dragon girl Lilac, the ...

''.

Books

Tyson's works have been included in the following books: * IMAGINE: the art of Imaginary Friends Studios (Artwork used) * Furries Furever: Draw and Color Anthro Characters in a Variety of Styles (Artist and writer of Chapter 6) * Digital Painting with Krita 2.9: Learn All of the Tools to Create Your Next Masterpiece (Cover artist) * Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita (Artwork used) * Made with Krita 2016 (Artwork used)

References